Kick start your creative process! Write your own non-sensical novel in the style of your favorite author! Generate reports for work in no time at all! Create a new and totally unique baby name!

Travesty can do all of this for you and more, at the touch of a button. Use your own words for input or choose from one of Travesty's canned texts. Create new words or reuse the words from your input. Mix styles of your favorite authors.

Travesty analyzes an input text for letter frequencies and sequences, and uses that analysis to form new words that match the original's sequences. It uses a user-selectable "level" to ensure that a certain number of adjacent letters present in the input will be generated in the output. When set to a low level, the new text has a number of gibberish words; at a high level, the same words from the input text appear almost untouched. Or, as Travesty would say:

Travesty an input text an input to a numberish words to for level, the output text from new text has an input text has and uses a user-selectable "level" to a low letters present letters present input to a high letter of gibber of adjacent input to for level, the input text an input will be generated input will be generated input.

The canned texts include several lists (baby names, city names), and there’s a new button (“Unique”) to eliminate all the names in the original list and the duplicates that Travesty generates, so you have a nice, clean list of usable names.

Sometimes you sit and sit, waiting for some inspiration to lead you into a writing task. Take some of your old writing, or that of a favorite author, and feed it to Travesty. As you read the output, enjoy a chuckle or two, and take inspiration from some of the new words that Travesty has come up with. If a simple computer program can do it, you can certainly do it better. Doesn't "pring decident" mean anything to you?

What???

Travesty is a text-generating program that uses an input text to generate familiar sounding output, based on letter frequencies of the original text.

The levels of Travesty are inversely proportional to the number of beers you've drunk. After a couple of beers, a level 9 analysis seems plausible, but to make sense of level 2 output, nine beers are required.

Travesty is based on a program published in Byte magazine (an early personal computer magazine) some 27 years ago. The program has remained popular through the years and been ported to several languages and machines. Here's the iPad version of this much-admired program originally written by Hugh Kenner and James O'Rourke.